In a move to drive more adoption in the enterprise, HP just took the covers off its ConvergedSystem for SAP HANA, a portfolio of high-powered data management systems for handling and analyzing big data.

“Organizations are making long-term, strategic architectural bets for their data centers and data management platforms,” said Tom Joyce, senior vice president and general manager of Converged Systems at HP. “SAP HANA provides a catalyst for business transformation and HP has the architecture, expertise and vision to meet its infrastructure needs. HP is investing in delivering the infrastructure that clients need to meet requirements of environments running SAP HANA.”

Making Informed Decisions Faster

Enterprises may be keen on adopting the architecture the HP ConvergedSystem portfolio for SAP HANA delivers clients -- if it lives up to its goals. The idea is to help enterprises deploy data management platforms faster by tapping into scalable systems that can meet shifting business needs.

HP specifically mentioned analytics, data warehousing workloads and running mission-critical business applications. Products in the new portfolio unify the servers, storage, networking, software and services that enterprises need to run their SAP HANA environments, which ultimately works to accelerate the ROI. HP is also boasting about analytics processing speeds that it says are up to double the speed of competing solutions.

“In-memory computing allows organizations to quickly make informed business decisions by processing complex transactions using massive amounts of data much faster than ever possible before,” said Matt Eastwood, group vice president and general manager of Enterprise Platform Group at market research firm IDC. “To capitalize on IMC, businesses need an architecture that is not only efficient, but that is highly available and easily scalable, so that organizations can quickly respond to changing needs of the business.”

Based on a modular, standards-based architecture, HP ConvergedSystem 500 for SAP HANA configurations range from 256 GB to 2 TB scale-up systems within a single memory pool. The platform offers up to 16 terabytes with scale-out systems that bridge memory across systems. The system is expected to be available this spring for a starting price of $87,787. Will customers buy?

We caught up with Charles King, principal analyst at Pund-IT, to get his take on HP’s chances of success with its new roll out. He told us SAP’s HANA in-memory database solution requires systems vendors to develop solutions according to very strict architectural guidelines. But the speed claims are real and could drive sales.

“I believe this offering is based on the newest generation HP Proliant servers, which are running Intel’s latest Xeon processors. The boost in the total size of the in-memory database that can be supported is pretty dramatic, in large part because of the memory improvements that Intel made in the Xeon family,” King said.

“This is a hot area of the market. SAP has bet a huge amount of money and it’s own reputation on the success of HANA. So far it’s a bet that’s been paying off very well for SAP and company partners like HP,” he added.